I just wanted to throw a quick thank you to the folks over at Hostgator.com. I have been with them for almost 4 years now, and I can honestly say, they are truly one of the best. I have nearly 25 or so domains hosted with them, and the admin interface is very nice and easy to use. It comes with lots of features and for the most part, it is point and click. You say you want a wordpress site, no problemo! Just click on one icon, follow the prompts, fill out the basics, and presto! Customer support is first rate. In four years, I have only had to contact them once, and that was just to get my ssh account activated, and it took less than 5 minutes. Downtime? What Downtime! I think they have only had one small outage that did not last longer than 30 minutes in the last four years. If you need a website or are looking to move your existing sites, I would not go anywhere else but Hostgator.com

I just stumbled upon this insanely awesome video of a Tri-Copter rigged with fireworks shooting at balloons. Granted it would be even cooler if it was using real missiles instead of some pretty lame fireworks, but nonetheless, I still would love to have it! Especially, when the neighbors kids are knocking my garbage cans over at 3AM, or was it the raccoons? Either way, I bet it would scare the pants/mask off of ‘em!JEALOUS!: Firework-Shooting R/C Helicopter Taking Out Hydrogen-Filled Balloons

I recently reinstalled my Ubuntu 10.10 32bit workstation with Ubuntu 10.10 64bit. I did this primarily to take advantage of the 4gigs for ram I have. The install went fine but I soon ran into a problem getting my Canon MP240 printer to work. Under Ubuntu 10.10 32bit, I had followed the instructions posted here, and it worked great. But now under 64bit, it decided it was not going to work. After banging my head against my desk for two days, I finally found the solution. I have posted here the entire process I went though. I now have a working printer and scanner. Thanks go to r3dux!

Step 1. Prerequisites

You need to Download the Driver Files which can be obtained directly from Canon’s Europe site. Next, you will need the libcupsys2 transitional package. Grab it from the official Ubuntu repos with APT. Now I will tell you that there seems to be some disparity on whether you actually need it or not. We will just say you do. I installed it, and everything seems to be fine. Once you have downloaded the printer driver file, navigate to the directory and we will get started with the meats and bones portion.
First, lets go ahead and install the libcupsys2 transitional file by issuing this command at a command prompt:

sudoapt-getinstall libcupsys2

Next, we will un-archive the printer drivers with this command:

tar-xvf MP240_debian_drivers.tar

You should now have two more .tar archives named MP240_debian_printer.tar and MP240_debian_scangear.tar. Next extract the contents of these two archives with:

tar-xvf MP240_debian_printer.tar
tar-xvf MP240_debian_scangear.tar

You should now have six new files named:
cnijfilter-common_3.00-1_i386.deb
cnijfilter-common_3.00-1.tar.gz
cnijfilter-mp240series_3.00-1_i386.deb
scangearmp-common_1.20-1_i386.deb
scangearmp-common_1.20-1.tar.gz
scangearmp-mp240series_1.20-1_i386.deb

You will notice that several of the files contain an i386 reference in the filename, normally these drivers would only be used on a 32bit install, but we can overcome this with a dpkg command line switch ‘ –force-architecture ‘. You can simply ignore the .gz archives as we will be using the .deb packages only.

Step 2. Printer Installation

Step 2a. This is where the Magic Happens!

Since we are running 64bit Ubuntu and we just installed 32bit drivers, you would more than likely have some problems. I kept getting some strange error about pstocanonij filter. Anyways, you need to install some 32bit libraries for your 32bit drivers to reference. This is how I got my printer working:

sudoapt-getinstall ia32-libs

Step 3. Scanner Installation

Done!
Now you need to goto System->Administration->Printing, and add your printer by clicking on Add, then select it from the list. Go through the prompts and your done. Print your test page or whatever you like. FYI, Ink levels do not work, so don’t rely on the drivers for that.

P.S. I know it’s been nearly a year since my last post, sorry about that, I’ve been busy. I will try to do better.